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 Sunday spread: Civil disobedience, a noble tactic, meets the new global media 01/14/01 - by John T. Crist - Philadelphia Inquirer During the last two decades of the 20th century, the world watched with amazement as one popular nonviolent uprising after another helped topple the old-guard leadership in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, South Africa, the Philippines, and most recently in Serbia against Europe's last despot. Most of these events were entirely unpredicted by the sagest of observers, who believed that such action could never be successful against entrenched and antidemocratic regimes. Building on the widely venerated successes of the Gandhian anticolonial struggle in India and the U.S. desegregation and civil-rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, these momentous developments firmly anchored civil disobedience and nonviolence in global public discourse. Now more than any other time in global history, it has been popularly accepted (at least in the abstract) as a legitimate form of political expression in countries around the world. But it is not always effectively deployed, and, as learned in Philadelphia last summer, it does not always work. On the eve of the first federal Martin Luther King's Birthday holiday of the new millennium, it is only natural for Americans in particular to consider the special significance of civil disobedience and nonviolence around the globe. Our republic was born of a struggle that aggressively used boycotts, illegal associations and assemblies, and even the conscientious and symbolic destruction of property (as in the Boston Tea Party) - all essential components of mass civil-disobedience campaigns - to help unseat an oppressive and unwanted occupier. Generations of Americans since then have turned to these controversial and confrontational tactics when voting, letter-writing, lobbying and demonstrating were either illegal or ineffectual. Dissenters have used civil disobedience to focus attention on the most divisive and troublesome issues of their time: slavery, the rights of working people, women's suffrage, opposition to war and nuclear weapons, and segregation. Civil disobedience has had to reconcile itself with the powerful role of media in global politics. A watchful media can help organizers accomplish three primary goals: recruiting dedicated people, communicating the movement's message to a mass audience, and changing the behavior of the government. The U.S. civil-rights movement undoubtedly benefited from being the first civil-disobedience movement to play out almost entirely in front of the cameras. By contrast, the demonstrators in Philadelphia did not draw the cameras, airtime, or front-page display that frequently defines whether a protest is successful. The politics of civil disobedience is in some sense the politics of shame, and to succeed, civil disobedience requires opponents who are unafraid to behave shamefully (like Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade) and audiences who are prepared to be ashamed. The targets of the Philadelphia protests during the Republican convention were so numerous and so far-flung that many likely did not even know they were targets, much less feel shame about it. The visual media also love a simple and direct message. Nonviolent movements are strongest when they stick to a few clear goals predicated on very persuasive moral ideas: Indians ought to run India, blacks ought to have the same rights as whites, leaders ought to respect the outcome of legitimate elections. The more difficult it is to build consensus around an issue, the more likely it is that civil disobedience will divide opinion rather than persuade opponents. The global-trade protesters in Seattle, in Washington, D.C., in Prague, and in Philadelphia faced one of the most difficult challenges on this score. How many people understand global trade policies and their ramifications around the world? How easy is it to explain? The global-trade protesters continue to struggle to break through with their message - they have developed their own media corps from independent journalists, for instance. But it is still an uphill battle. Civil-disobedience movements have changed the behavior of government, at least on the tactical front. Lessons learned during the protests of the 1950s, '60s and '70s in the United States and Europe have led many governments away from paramilitary or provocative crowd-control tactics and the use of deadly force against public demonstrations and protests. (The PBS documentary A Force More Powerful, broadcast in September, chillingly recounts some of the more repressive tactics that governments have used against nonviolent protests around the world.) Ironically, police are now more likely to find themselves in the position of helping organizers to prepare for protest, and organizers have often depended upon police for technical advice about parking, portable toilets, sound systems, insurance, and other logistical issues that arise when thousands of people congregate. This trend toward a tacit consensus among demonstrators and police on how to conduct protest based on civil disobedience suggests that protesters are succeeding in establishing a common ground in which to conduct the next generation's debates about the direction of social change. John T. Crist, Ph.D., is a program officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, an independent institution created by Congress to promote research, education and training on the peaceful resolution of international conflicts. The views expressed here are his own and not the Institute's. |
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